Opera Mini to bring full Flash to mobile browsing

You might recall that while discussing the iPhone's mobile version of Safari, we recently lamented the lack of full Flash support on mobile browsers. After all, what's the point of browsing the Internet if you can't watch that YouTube video of the Star Wars kid? Well fear not: those lovable Norwegians behind the popular Opera browser are bringing YouTube to the wireless handset. The forthcoming update of Opera Mini will be the first mobile browser to incorporate the full version of Flash into its code, so that you finally can browse animation-intensive websites and watch videos on the go. What's more, the new version of Opera Mini features small screen rendering, horizontal scrolling and an overview mode for zooming in and out of web pages: it's basically the iPhone browser sans multitouch. What's more, Opera claims that Opera Mini's backend compression technology will allow a wide variety of handsets to run the browser, not just smartphones. Opera Mini will be available as a public beta on the 19th but don't get too excited if you're a Verizon Wireless customer, as the browser is blocked on the Verizon network.

For more on Opera Mini:
- see this ZDnet article
- and sign up for the public beta at Opera's website